The Music City Review

The Nashville Symphony has just released a new CD titled “Organ Concertos” under the American Classics label at Naxos. On this CD is a piece titled “Resilience” by Wayne Oquin that I had the pleasure of hearing live back in February of 2023. To my surprise I was sitting right behind Oquin at the concert and was able to shake his hand afterwards. One thing led to another and in May of that year I was headed towards Lincoln Center Plaza, where Oquin is the Chair of Ear Training at Juilliard, for a meeting with him. It was Jury week at Juilliard and students buzzed anxiously throughout the halls waiting to sum up their semester’s work for their teachers. Oquin met me in the lobby and we took the elevator to the fifth floor where we proceeded to enter the classroom where he does most of his teaching.

The next several hours of conversation gave me a glimpse into his life and work as both a composer and an educator.  Oquin began his affiliation with Juilliard as a doctoral student and in 2008 he won the Richard F. French Prize for best dissertation. That same year he was appointed to the faculty. He has served in numerous positions from the Juilliard Extension school to now serving as the Chair of Ear Training as well as spending a year as Visiting Professor at Juilliard’s campus in Tianjin. As with many professors that I know, he carries a heavy load of classes —over sixteen this past year— ranging from ear training, music theory, to a course on Beethoven’s Heroic Period.

During our meeting, Wayne showed me some videos he had filmed to accompany a lecture on music education he was giving for the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA) conference. These short videos depicted daily life inside his classroom. Filmed in the very room I was sitting, fourth-year undergraduate students were going through a flurry of ear training exercises. In every video the students are conducting and keeping a strong beat going while solving musical problems: some videos show students singing solfège scales up and down, Oquin directing the students to a new scale at the last moment; another depicts a clef reading exercise: students go around the room dictating the next note as the clef changes every beat. The next video, titled “Leader – Follower” has one student reading out a rhythmic pattern from music while another student has to repeat back what they just heard. The trick is that the first student does not stop the excerpt once they start. If you are the follower, then you are tasked with taking in new musical information while simultaneously processing and producing material you just heard. The pace in all of these videos verges on frenetic, just fast enough that you feel like you are about to lose control. The pressure is high; accuracy is prized, and you must be on your toes. Oquin explains to me in between the videos “No matter where they are, I try to push them.”

It is clear that Oquin’s goal for the students is to develop fluency with the fundamentals of this musical material. He is pushing the students to know more than just the correct answer, he wants the relevant material to be a part of their vernacular. I noticed a small detail that developed into a trend. Frequently Oquin stops the exercise to correct not technical issues, but musical ones. For example, in an exercise that contained no notes, just rhythmic values, he asks the class to pay attention to how the rhythm of the excerpt informs the musical phrasing. He asserts that even in counting rhythms, the overall musical phrase is still important. “I would like to think that one reason our orchestra delivers is because of this class,” he told me. Watching Oquin teach and talk about his pedagogy with such enthusiasm made me appreciate how desperately we need teachers that champion subjects like these.

Juilliard is in the fortunate position to attract some of the world’s top talent for classical music. With such a student population the professors need to be at the top of their game. Oquin does not water down this material for the students but elevates the students to the level of the material. In these videos the room is set up with the chairs forming a semicircle around the perimeter of the room. There is no second row in which to hide. He told me that at every class, the students know that they will sing a dictation or perform an exercise in front of their peers. Like all good teachers, he expects much from them, but he reciprocates by learning each of the students’ majors and goals for their time at Juilliard.  He told me that it is important for him to know how his students learn and how they best function within the larger group. This allows him to tailor his teaching to the students.

I also got to speak with one of Oquin’s students, Peter Dudek, a first-year master’s student studying Viola. Peter serves as a teaching fellow for Oquin in his music theory classes and I was interested to hear his perspective. One of the first things that Peter said to me was, “His lessons go well beyond the theory curriculum in a classroom setting. I never thought to myself that my music theory professor would become the person that had the largest impact on my musicianship and humanity.” I was taken aback – changing your humanity is a tall compliment for any person. When I questioned Peter on that point, he added that what he finds most profound about Oquin’s classes is that he teaches how to think and approach the music critically. He said that the classes have an open discussion with differing opinions from the students, which enriches the overall discovery of the music. This is helped by the fact that Peter calls him “an extremely effective communicator” as well. But above all else, the thing that Peter stressed to me the most was that Oquin works as hard as he can in every aspect of life. That intensity, Peter told me, has made him want to be the best that he can be.

Peter said that when he originally made the choice to come to Juilliard in 2019, he did not give much thought to his theory teachers but instead focused on who his primary instrumental teacher would be. After taking Oquin’s class however, Peter told me “Taking Dr. Oquin’s class has been the best decision I’ve made for myself at Juilliard.” This must be a common sentiment because his classes are always waitlisted when class registration time comes around. Peter chuckled and said that even though Oquin is known for making students perform in front of the whole class, they know that at the end of the semester they will walk away stronger musicians. I also spoke with Leslie Ashworth, a doctoral fellow at Juilliard who also serves as a faculty member for the Juilliard Pre-College division in Ear Training and Theory. She told me that she has “had a behind-the-scenes view for two years. If you watch his teaching closely you see he has a reason for every single thing he’s doing and saying, all day long. But what many don’t see is that he’s bringing that same level of intensity and intentionality to his music: crafting, refining, polishing, examining and reexamining every phrase down to the most intricate detail.”

With Oquin’s schedule of teaching, concerts, and conferences, I asked him about his time management and how he schedules his day to take on so many projects at once. He started by saying that during the school year Juilliard demands much of his time. “There’s no question that I’m not able to write as much as another composer without these obligations. But I view my job at Juilliard as a luxury. I don’t have to churn out piece after piece to sustain myself. I’m in a position where I can take on only the pieces that I really want to write and can really spend the time honing the craft.”

Interestingly, I came to know Oquin through his work as a composer, but many inside Juilliard–students and faculty–seem unaware of his work outside of the classroom. Oquin likes to keep it this way. At one point he mentioned that he is an “addict of composition.” Although his oeuvre is smaller, he has produced music that will outlast him, a well-balanced collection of works for all types of ensembles: orchestral, wind band, choral, and chamber. The wind ensemble is a genre that he finds ripe territory for many reasons, chief among them is that he wants quality music to be written for students at an accessible level, and there are many more students in wind ensembles across the country than there are in orchestras. The quality of his music has been recognized: in 2018 he won the National Band Association’s William D. Revelli Award for his Song for Silent Voices, which was written for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Wind Symphony in the wake of the Parkland shooting massacre.

He has had a number of major successes in orchestral music, and they seem to be accelerating at an exponential rate. One of the firsts came in 2015 with Echoes of a Solitary Voice. This piece originated with composer and conductor Lorin Maazel, who was writing a new work for the Danish National Symphony and their famous Malko Conducting Competition. At the time of Maazel’s death in 2014, the piece was left in a fragmentary form. Maazel’s widow Dietlinde asked Oquin to finish the piece. After looking over the materials Oquin realized that there was not enough musical material for him to bring the piece to its completion. He asked if he could instead take the harmonic and motivic cells that Maazel left behind and use that to compose his own piece. Echoes of a Solitary Voice was the result and was used as the audition piece in the 2015 Malko Competition. The triumph of this piece brought Oquin’s music to worldwide attention – many orchestral directors and managers became familiar with his work.

One of those directors was Carl St. Clair, who leads the Pacific Symphony. St. Clair asked Oquin to write a piece for the Pacific Symphony and that became the compact organ concerto Resilience. A portion of the success of this piece is owed to friend, collaborator, and master Organist Paul Jacobs who has championed the work tirelessly. The Grammy Award-winning Jacobs has been a long-time supporter of Oquin and is a fellow faculty member at Juilliard.

After the successful premiere of the piece, Paul Jacobs brought the piece to the Philadelphia Orchestra and Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who enjoyed the piece so much that they opened and closed their 2017-2018 season with the piece, as well as taking it on a European tour. Since then, it was chosen by Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony to be included on their record of American Organ Concertos. These live recorded concerts in Nashville are where I met Oquin. Speaking with Leslie Ashworth again she said: “He wrote this piece in 2015. It has taken nine years for an orchestra to finally record it—not uncommon in the world of new music. But he has works of equal quality that have never been heard outside the concert hall. This is what makes this project with the Nashville Symphony so meaningful.”

When I spoke with Oquin at Juilliard, he reflected on Resilience with a sense of pride. Its success is earned – Oquin has extensively revised the piece between each of its performances. “I didn’t learn my orchestration in a classroom: I learned from doing this with the pros in high-profile venues. It was daunting in a way.” In the high school and collegiate wind band world a piece may be rehearsed 30 times before it is performed. In the professional orchestral world, there is not that luxury of time – a piece may only have two run throughs and 30 minutes of rehearsal before a concert. Oquin said that has taught him to meticulously review every note in every part. Once in front of an orchestra, there is just no time to correct mistakes or provide revisions.

This fixation over the minutest of details was another aspect of Oquin that became quickly evident to me through our conversation. The devil is in the details. For Resilience, that meant revisions and edits between each performance or whenever he could find the time – nights, weekends, even Christmas day. If he wanted a section to crescendo, he thought, how can this be the most effective crescendo? How can I increase the intensity for every beat? For the performances in Nashville, he said that a main goal of his was to get the music to drive forward. He spent hours taking out every unnecessary note; he wanted the economy of notes to drive the piece.

With all this constant tinkering I asked if he has ever felt that some pieces were completed and did not need any further revisions. After all, Songs for Silent Voices had won an award, and he still revised the piece for up to five years afterwards. “Sometimes the details are microscopic, but the details are important to me.” He feels that some of his pieces are complete, especially since they have been published. Inherent in the business model of publishing is that pieces are finished; no publishing house wants to print constant updates, so revisions to existing works can get complicated. Perhaps because of this, Oquin now self-publishes his work on his website, which allows him to edit the pieces when he deems necessary. Nashville’s recording of Resilience is Oquin’s first commercial orchestral recording, which certainly cements that version of the piece. I asked if he planned any further revisions: He smiled.

Towards the end of our conversation Oquin said, “I think that the possibilities of where music can go are vastly greater than what we think.” His life and music are a testament to that. He is one of the sharpest musical minds I know living today, and his obsession with every aspect of music is something to admire. One reason that the name of Juilliard carries weight around musical circles is because of professors like Wayne Oquin. The classroom we had our discussion in was just like any other in the many conservatories that I have been in – student chairs facing a chalk board and a piano. The quality of the professor is what makes a difference. Oquin credits much to his former teachers, not only at Juilliard but at North Shore High School and Texas State University. I leave you with a quote from an article he wrote for the TMEA, titled “Why Teaching Matters.”

The hardest and most rewarding part of my job is maintaining the lofty standards of those who taught me. I find great satisfaction in continuing the legacy of my former teachers. Somewhere in their classrooms I learned to value excellence for its own sake. This is what every music teacher I know is offering the world. It is certainly what I aspire to in my own work. And there’s much work to be done.